BlueSteps Career Management and Executive Search Blog

The BlueSteps Career Management Blog is written with a C-level audience in mind on career management topics ranging from executive compensation, executive resumes, and interview tips to networking, executive job search, and gaining visibility as a professional in one’s industry.

BlueSteps is an exclusive service of the Association of Executive Search and Leadership Consultants, the voice of excellence for executive search and leadership consultants worldwide. Confidentiality is a cornerstone of AESC's mission, and only AESC member firms and consultants have access to BlueSteps members resume info. Click here to learn more about the additional benefits of becoming a BlueSteps member.

The AESC BlueSteps survey of 778 executives was conducted in September 2013 and included responses from CEOs, CFOs, Board Members, Senior VPs, VPs and other management worldwide, including 53 percent from the Americas, 35 percent from EMEA and 12 percent from Asia/Pacific.

“This BlueSteps report highlights the inconsistencies in perception about C-suite executives, in contrast to the high profile cases of robust corner office salaries,” said Peter Felix, President and CEO of AESC. “On the contrary, for most senior executives in our survey salary increases and bonuses have only modestly begun to rise after the financial crisis.”

The 2014 AESC’s BlueSteps Executive Compensation survey was conducted from October 2014 to November 2014 and received 907 responses from senior-level executives across the world. The purpose of this survey was to better understand trends in global executive compensation and provide a unique benchmarking resource, providing executive compensation information across a wide range of industries, functional roles and regions.

When choosing your career path, it is often said that one must choose between job satisfaction and salary, as it is impossible to achieve both. In times of economic uncertainty, many people are choosing careers based on salary alone, however, Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, now warns that this decision can have adverse effects.

Releasing the results of their 2012 Executive Compensation Survey, BlueSteps, the executive career management service of the Association of Executive Search Consultants (AESC), announced today that even though turnover in the C-suite is increasingly rapid, 65.4% of global executives, from a survey of 731 executives worldwide, believe long-term incentives do in fact motivate them to higher levels of performance.

Anything that affects your confidence level negatively in negotiations is going to cost you and that’s just a fact. And while it certainly may be difficult to keep your confidence (and chin) up in an economy that’s this down, there are still always some things working in your favor. I’m going to explain one of them, a technique I call the lockdown maneuver.

There are federal employment laws which impact your executive career. When professionals and executives transition in or out of a company, there is a myriad of issues to consider. Compensation, severance, benefits, retirement accounts, non-compete clauses, discrimination, and other legal rights are being negotiated and can dramatically affect your career.